Posted on 07/27/2013 2:58:07 PM PDT by BigReb555
During my childhood of the 50s, songs like “Swanee River”, “Mammy” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee”, all best sung by the late great Al Jolson, were very popular in the South and throughout the USA.
(Excerpt) Read more at canadafreepress.com ...
After 1972, I never heard “Conny Kramer” again until Youtube came along.
I'm 100% Yankee, but I have a question. The 1945 film "Rhapsody in Blue", concerning the life of George Gershwin, starred Alan Alda's father as Gershwin and Al Jolson as himself, and featured the song "Swanee".
I recently saw a clip from this movie and I was wondering: "Why would a New Yorker like Gershwin write a song about the South?"
And besides the fact that it is a very catchy tune and Jolson sang it, why would it go over so well with Northeners?
Mostly I hate the poverty and backwardness of the South at that time. I hate that people took advantage of that poverty and backwardness for their own amusement and profit. I also hate that Southerners allowed themselves to be taken advantage of.
They should have said, “screw the magnolias and moonlight, we’re building railroads, steel mills, automobile factories, and skyscrapers”.
“...I hate that people took advantage of that poverty and backwardness for their own amusement and profit...”
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Such as it ever was, since the beginning of time, and on through the present.
Then read up on what inspired Gerschwin to write “Porgy and Bess”, a musical about the Gullah people of Charleston & the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Its universal appeal is simply the hallmark of great art.
Even this Southerner doesn’t believe that New Yorkers are somehow locked into their own special world.
I recently saw a clip from this movie and I was wondering: "Why would a New Yorker like Gershwin write a song about the South?"
And besides the fact that it is a very catchy tune and Jolson sang it, why would it go over so well with Northeners?
In the early part of the twentieth century, the South came to be romantically portrayed as a land of sunshine full of happy, friendly people where life was simple, relaxed and slow-paced--in contrast to the hectic pace of life in the industrialized North. Here are a few hit songs that reflect that view:
They should have said, “screw the magnolias and moonlight, we’re building railroads, steel mills, automobile factories, and skyscrapers”.
But railroads, steel mills, automobile factories and skyscrapers were built in the South precisely because Southerners allowed themselves to be taken advantage of. The "poverty and backwardness" of the region made for lower operating costs, a major reason that entrepreneurs have been attracted to the South--from the steel makers in the nineteenth century and textile manufacturers in the twentieth to the car makers of today.
If were given a choice to live in a free agrarian republic or a centralized corporate federal leviathan I would gladly chose the former.
What we got was the KKK, sharecroppers, Tobacco Road, mammies, Big Daddies. What was going on in Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and all along the Great Lakes should have been going on in the South. Sure we got a steel mill in Birmingham and a auto plant in Atlanta. Crumbs! People from Europe should have been flocking to Norfolk, Charleston, or Savannah, and not New York City.
...and Democrats.
Actually the Souths problem with democrats started with the slavrocrisy and jeff davis.
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